The Lake District, 2017
I live in a quiet village, more a hamlet really, not far from Windermere. A remote and peaceful place, somewhere my past could not follow me, or so I thought. I moved here from Cambridgeshire after Doug and Toby died to be near my elderly parents, and when they died too, I stayed. I’ve built a simple, solitary life for myself, just me and my little dog Rufus, and if the other inhabitants of this tiny community know my story, if they remember the grim details of my murdered family from the newspapers before I came to live amidst them, they’ve kept it to themselves, and for that I’ve been grateful.
But now Hannah’s face is once more front-page news, her trial a media circus, a tabloid editor’s dream. It has everything, after all: two beautiful teenage girls, an affluent successful family torn apart by adultery, kidnap, suicide and murder – and not one of us who played a part in the whole awful business has escaped without blame. Each of our actions another scrutinized detail in the story that has had the nation gripped these past six weeks.
Who knows what the outcome will be? Hannah will almost certainly be sent back to prison – there’ll be no wriggling her way out of this one. How she kidnapped Luke, how she confessed to Emily’s murder – though she’s denying that now, of course. But what of the rest of us? Oliver’s affair with Nadia, her death, the abduction of baby Lana. Such a tangled, complicated web.
It’s become clear that Hannah’s allegations about her mother’s murder can’t be substantiated. After all, who would believe the desperate rantings of a proven liar, killer and kidnapper, over someone like Rose, who’s presented herself so well throughout this trial? A retired surgeon in her late sixties now, responsible for saving the lives of countless children, years of charity work to her name, beloved by her colleagues and community. A dignified, gentle soul. Yes, there’s a lot of public sympathy for Rose, a feeling that she’s suffered enough. That will please her, I’m sure – it always was so important for her to be liked.
Oliver hasn’t come out of it quite so well. Because there were others, apparently, and plenty of them, all ex-students of his, before, during and even long after his affair with Nadia, most of whom have come out of the woodwork telling their stories about how they too were victims of ‘Cheating sex-pest prof’, providing the perfect combination of titillation and schadenfreude the British public so enjoy.
As for my part in it all, my involvement in baby Lana’s story, the general feeling is I’ll get off lightly. I too have suffered enough will be the view: my murdered husband, my murdered child. Yet I should be punished, I want to be. I have carried the guilt for decades for what I did to Nadia’s grieving family. Her parents died without ever knowing the truth and for that I think I should pay.
Still, by hook or by crook, the mess will be made sense of, people will be punished while others will go free, the feeding frenzy will eventually die away until someone else’s tragedy replaces it. Of course, what almost nobody knows, what they will never know, is what Rose confessed to me the night of Nadia’s death, the night they brought little Lana to our door. They don’t know that when Doug took Oliver to the kitchen to make up the bottle of formula, Rose turned to me, her eyes wide with panic.
‘Beth,’ she said, ‘Beth, I have to tell you something.’
I looked at her stricken face in surprise. ‘What’s the matter? What is it, Rose?’
And that’s when she told me. ‘I pushed her, Beth,’ she whispered. ‘I pushed her.’
I stared at her in shock.
‘I arranged to meet her, I wanted to explain to her that she needed to stop, that she’d never have Oliver, that he was my husband and she had to stop her harassment. But she was so arrogant, so awful, taunting me, goading me, telling me how Oliver had pursued her, that he … that he slept with lots of his students. It was lies, all lies! I lost my head, I don’t know what happened, I just wanted her to stop. To stop talking, stop ruining everything. I thought of my darling little daughter and our lovely life and this girl, this silly, awful girl, was laughing at me, laughing at all of us, telling me I had no idea, that I was deluded, that everyone at the university knew what my husband was really like.’
‘Rose,’ was all I could say. ‘Oh God no, Rose.’ I didn’t want to hear any more, I wanted her to stop, to block my ears from hearing it.
‘I pushed her. Oh, Beth. I pushed her. I wanted her to die, just for a moment, I wanted it. Even as she fell … for a second I was glad.’ She looked at me, her eyes full of horror. ‘Oh, Beth, what has happened … what has happened to me? What am I going to do?’
I could hear Doug and Oliver talking in the kitchen. I had only seconds to decide. ‘Shush,’ I said. ‘Shush, Rose. Stop and let me think.’ She watched me anxiously, her eyes never leaving my face. ‘Rose,’ I said at last, ‘you must never tell another soul about this. No one, not ever. Does Oliver know?’
She shook her head. ‘You’re the only person I’ve told.’
‘OK. Good.’ I could hear the others, about to come back in. ‘She jumped, Rose,’ I said. ‘OK? It wasn’t your fault.’
She nodded, her frightened eyes wide. ‘Yes.’
‘It’ll be our secret, no one ever has to find out.’
‘You’ll never tell anyone? Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
It’s a detail I’ve always carefully omitted over the years, when I’ve told myself the story of how Hannah came into our lives. Because it casts a rather different light on things, doesn’t it? I wanted Lana for myself, you see. I knew it from the moment Rose appeared on my doorstep that night. If Doug had known the truth behind Nadia’s death, he would have gone to the police, I have no doubt about that. So when I promised Rose I would keep her secret, it was myself I was thinking of, deep down. I can’t pretend otherwise any more, no matter how hard I’ve tried to wipe it from my memory. It was so I could keep Lana for myself. Does that make me as bad as Rose? Yes, actually, I rather think it does.
And so, of course, I did keep the promise I made to Rose that night. I didn’t tell another soul. In fact, neither of us spoke of it again, not even the day Hannah overheard us talking in the kitchen. All she heard was Rose saying she’d been the last person to see Nadia alive, that everyone would think she’d killed her, and Hannah, not wanting to believe her mother would abandon her by choice, put two and two together herself. So for years I kept Rose’s secret – until, that is, the day that Emily found me.
It was seven years after the fire, seven years since Hannah told Emily that she was her sister, and what her father had done. Seven years since the day she disappeared. I don’t know how she found me here in such a remote spot – my old neighbours, I suppose, or perhaps the clinic where I worked passed on my new address. She knocked on the door one afternoon out of the blue. I remember my stomach dropped like a stone to see her standing there – I recognized her immediately from the day I’d followed Hannah to Suffolk, when she was pretending to be ‘Becky’. ‘Emily,’ I said. ‘You’re Emily Lawson, aren’t you? What are you doing here?’ It was as though a ghost had appeared on my doorstep. Deep down I had always believed that, like Doug and Toby, she was dead too, another of Hannah’s victims.
‘May I come in?’ she asked. She had Rose’s clear blue eyes, Oliver’s thick dark hair, such a very pretty girl – or woman, I should say; she was twenty-five years old by then.